Flock
November 10, 2007 11:49 AM   Subscribe

 
yawnfilter.
posted by awesomebrad at 11:55 AM on November 10, 2007 [2 favorites]


flocking hell!
posted by boo_radley at 11:58 AM on November 10, 2007


With Flock and my brown Zune, I'm all set for The Social - alright!
posted by porn in the woods at 11:59 AM on November 10, 2007 [5 favorites]


Hey have you heard of this sweet indie photo site called flickr? the have "tags." Or howabout this cool social bookmarking site, called like de.li.cio.us or something.

2005, your Social Web Browser is calling.
posted by coolhappysteve at 12:01 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


I finally see a good reason for browser sniffing.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:01 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


It does seem a little late to market. It had a lot of hype around it when it was first announced. I'm sure this sort of thing must appeal to some people.
posted by chunking express at 12:06 PM on November 10, 2007


porn in the woods: "With Flock and my brown Zune, I'm all set for The Social - alright!"

If you neglected The Social because you were waiting for Flock 1.0, you waited too long. So long, The Social.
posted by Plutor at 12:11 PM on November 10, 2007


What is and how does?
posted by Brian B. at 12:28 PM on November 10, 2007


Oh, you know, if you want to twitter your flickr stream over rss into bloglines, it can route that through google maps for you. Other than that, it's just a bitched-up Mozilla.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:33 PM on November 10, 2007 [3 favorites]


Crap, I missed the Socialâ„¢ entirely.

The new Zune slogan is: You make it you

Still lousy, but at least it doesn't bring to mind ice cream socials at the old folks home. Anyone for a sasparilla?
posted by porn in the woods at 12:38 PM on November 10, 2007


I'm using it right now. Having all those social apps right there in sidebar is useful if you're into all those social apps.

But currently I bounce between Safari 3 on the PC, because of the cool way it does in page searches and you can manually resize any text area and Camino on the Mac, just 'cause it's a stripped down Firefox with inline spellchecking. If someone could combine those features in one browser along with integrated delicious bookmarks that would be awesome.

The interface is very 2.0, gradients and sheen everywhere.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:51 PM on November 10, 2007


You guys are becoming the people I go on the web to get away from.
posted by srboisvert at 12:56 PM on November 10, 2007 [10 favorites]


The marketing text on this is very annoying "Start Flocking now, and feel what it's like to be everywhere at once Get ready to meet your new favorite browser!"

Isn't this supposed to appeal to tech-savvy people? I mean, that's who uses these services. Those are the people who care.

But who knows, maybe people go for that sort of thing.
posted by delmoi at 12:58 PM on November 10, 2007


Is this "Flocking" something which might violate one's parole?
posted by hojoki at 1:04 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


I tried so hard to care I almost broke a sweat. Almost. Still don't care.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:05 PM on November 10, 2007 [3 favorites]


Flock is alright if you feel that you have to be connected to your friends 24/7. But, I like having time with my thoughts. I don't really need to know that my friend in San Fran is going to put on his blue sweater, then eat burritos after going to the gym.
posted by oddman at 1:07 PM on November 10, 2007


I'm using it on my work machine.. the facebook status/twitter integration is kind of novel.. but the browser seems incredibly slow. Beyond that, I really get a sense that the functionality is trying to be "all things to all people" - not the best strategy to employ if your product doesn't excel in a few specific areas. Just the same, the browser is an interesting experiment.I'm in love with BonEcho at the moment.. what could be better than firefox that actually works on Mactel?
posted by serial_consign at 1:07 PM on November 10, 2007


Is this something you need a computer to understand?
posted by ericb at 1:08 PM on November 10, 2007


Did somebody say "burritos"?
posted by tepidmonkey at 1:12 PM on November 10, 2007


At first glance, it's pretty impressive. Sure you can mock the the idea that's a social browser, but I'm liking the way its changed the browser interface from just browsing pages to being able to actively post and view different media/information from one application window.

The multiple item clipboard rocks, like "holyshit, that opens up a lot of possibilities!" rocks.

The built in media streaming ability is way cool too. What's really like wow though is the My World pages, which is list of your favorite sites, feeds and media streams.

The most annoying thing is having to re-enter all my account passwords, especially for flickr. Yahoo should be dragged out back and shot for this foolishness.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:12 PM on November 10, 2007


The hilarious thing about the Zune is that even though it had the capability to share files with other zunes in it's proximity, Microsoft had crippled that capability with DRM in order to avoid pissing off the content creators.
posted by delmoi at 1:14 PM on November 10, 2007


I use it for all the shit I don't want in my FF, IE or Safari History or cache or autocomplete. Remains to be seen if this version works alright, because the previous incarnations were buggy as hell...
posted by Skygazer at 1:40 PM on November 10, 2007


See, I thought the thing about this "Web2.0" deal was that websites were now applications, and the browser was now the operating system. Suddenly, with Flock, the applications become integrated with the operating system. That isn't a good idea, right? For a start, when the next new, cool, application comes out, Flock won't support it any better than Firefox, and as the current applications it features become old and stale (as they always do, hello MySpace) their glowing little buttons will still be stuck to the interface until the creators of Flock decide what to kill off and what to keep.

Flock reveals the failure of Web2.0. We shouldn't need a special browser to do what it does. We shouldn't need a predefined set of applications that are supported. If the Browser is the Operating System, then Flock looks like WindowsME.
posted by Jimbob at 1:41 PM on November 10, 2007 [11 favorites]


I herd this was coming.
posted by rob511 at 1:50 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


Looked interesting, but I stopped using it when I realized it wouldn't work with many essential Firefox plugins, like Zotero. Have they fixed that?
posted by felix betachat at 2:11 PM on November 10, 2007


Jimbob, I hear what you're saying but this is the first browser that I know of to do all these things. As a more regular user, I don't care about Web 2.0 or whatever other buzzwords there are.

For the first time, I've got a lot of apps bundled in one super app and it's seems damn useful right off the bat.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:27 PM on November 10, 2007


twitter your flickr stream over rss into bloglines, it can route that through google maps for you

so, this will bring twitcasting to the twitosphere?
posted by quonsar at 2:48 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


Dear Flock, why won't you install on my other machine? You just bounce once, show me a little triangle and then nothing. I thought we were having a good time, what happened?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:08 PM on November 10, 2007


Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod.
posted by genghis at 3:10 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


This looks good, but my internet is broken when they email me to netscape, I think the googles are redirecting my hotmail to spam it out, can someone please cancel that mailing list, or even better just delete it please because I'm worried it will infect my folder.
posted by signal at 3:14 PM on November 10, 2007 [2 favorites]


Meet the Flockers?
posted by klangklangston at 3:15 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]


I think the googles are redirecting my hotmail to spam it out...

No. I think you first need to cancel Google. If that doesn't work, it's likely that Hotmail changed some kind of setting on your ISP's server. Be sure to check out MetaTalk for more detail. Or, you can e-mail reklaw for help.
posted by ericb at 3:21 PM on November 10, 2007


Brandon Blatcher: "Jimbob, I hear what you're saying but this is the first browser that I know of to do all these things."

Let me introduce you to a web browser that can do Flickr, del.icio.us, and twitter. It's called all of them.
posted by Plutor at 3:28 PM on November 10, 2007 [3 favorites]


to avoid pissing off the content creatorsowners.

Fixed that for you, because they are NOT necessarily the same people/corporations and are not necessarily pissed off by the same thing. (Current example: the Writers' Strike in which the creators are very pissed off at the owners.)

Back on topic, I tried Flock for a couple hours last night, importing my massive numbers of Firefox bookmarks and ignoring most of the 'social' functions and it actually seemed to run faster than FF2.0 when I had a lot of tabs open. Which seemed weird. I must have been doing something rightwrongweird...
posted by wendell at 3:30 PM on November 10, 2007



Let me introduce you to a web browser that can do Flickr, del.icio.us, and twitter. It's called all of them.


Not like Flock. Whether this is good or bad, time will tell.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:44 PM on November 10, 2007


I'm using Flock, and it's pretty solid. I love the Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc integration a lot.

However, the feed reader sucks dong. I have no idea, and can't figure out how to change when it checks feeds for updates. Thank goodness for gReader. It's always checking.
posted by SansPoint at 4:03 PM on November 10, 2007


I've had it installed for 10 minutes and it's already crashed twice. It doesn't seem to like quicktime on the mac.
posted by empath at 5:23 PM on November 10, 2007


That's odd empath. I've been using it for a week or so now and it is the most stable Mac browser I've used. I have issues with safari, webkit, and firefox freezing when I use flash. Flock just seems to work for me. I really don't use any of the web 2.0 features.
posted by aburd at 6:37 PM on November 10, 2007


"finally"?

You mean there was a population of people somewhere waiting breathlessly for this to appear?
posted by Ynoxas at 7:40 PM on November 10, 2007


Well I have downloaded it and tried it again, lest I be accused of speaking out my arse above. Last time I tried it was about six months ago I guess.

And, no, I can't see the point.

First, it doesn't do anything fancy with a pile of sites I actually use, like Tumblr and Last.fm, not to mention the newest socially enabled site, Metafilter.

And it's integration of del.icio.us is nowhere near as good as the standard Firefox del.icio.us toolbar extension.

And it's slower than Firefox.
posted by Jimbob at 7:45 PM on November 10, 2007


You mean there was a population of people somewhere waiting breathlessly for this to appear?

Maybe? I don't know. I meant that it was announced ages ago, and is now finally complete.
posted by chunking express at 7:57 PM on November 10, 2007


This flocking...






...it vibrates?
posted by allkindsoftime at 11:29 PM on November 10, 2007


Flock is a decent browser for Mac users, but not worth it for Windows, imo. Wake me up when Songbird becomes something worthwhile.

1.0 launched last week I think. Maybe they sent the press release this week ...
posted by mrgrimm at 9:04 AM on November 11, 2007


I gave Flock a long serious try. It ran away with my RAM at a spectacular rate and would start maxing the CPU after a day or two. Then I remembered that Firefox 1.7 used to do the same damn thing...

Unless/until it uses the Gecko version used in Firefox 2.0, Flock is of no interest to me.

It's probably too late to the party to be really useful to anyone. By this time, the more useful approach might be to produce a single big Firefox add-in that rolled up a shitload of "social" features and call it "Flock."
posted by lodurr at 11:43 AM on November 11, 2007


lodurr: that's what Flock is. Yet another XUL browser.

It could easily be a Firefox extension, but that's harder to get venture capitalists to throw money at.

I first saw someone using Flock a few weeks ago, the guy's in my CS course. He's such a stereotypical Web2.0 developer douchebag it hurts. It's like he unit tests his own farts, while GTDing.
posted by blasdelf at 12:24 AM on November 12, 2007


Oh, yeah, I get what it is, just saying (guess we agree) that it would be more logical as a XUL extension (or, more likely, a bundle of them).

I'm hesitant to trash on it too much -- I think it's great that people try to do different stuff -- but it doesn't seem that different, and it doesn't really do much of its stuff better than the available FF extensions do. As with Camino, I'm left wondering what we're supposed to think the point is. If they want us to use it, they've got to give us a reason. It might be just fine -- aside from the performance issues, it seems to me to be just fine -- but it's got to be better than just fine, it's got to give us something that Firefox or Safari or Opera don't give us.
posted by lodurr at 7:41 AM on November 12, 2007


It doesn't seem to like quicktime on the mac.

I like it a little more now because it has taste.
posted by srboisvert at 10:50 AM on November 12, 2007


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